Voip Blog
Telephony And Telegraphy
Sunday, May 11, 2008
This short movie from 1946 explains the opportunities you might have had back then as someone who worked in "wire" communications--either telephone or telegraphy:
The jobs are indeed fairly similar. They involve wires, communication, routing messages, billing customers, and the like. The main difference is the product: one delivers a voice product, the other involves a data product.
Telegraphy predates telephony by at least a century. While electrical telegraphs did not come into existence until the early part of the 19th century, optical telegraphs were used in the late 18th century for message delivery. If you count smoke signals or hydraulic telegraphs, telegraphy goes back much further!
Telegraphy had a long head start in terms of development, but it also has the advantage that it was possible to take the written word and communicate it via a number of different means. Telephony, however, didn't have a feasible way to happen prior to the invention of an electronic system to transmit the human voice in the late 19th century.
In the early part of the 20th century, both telephony and telegraphy had similar problems: the delivery of their product required a lot of people. While automated switching equipment made it possible to make local calls without the assistance of an operator, long distance or other specials services required a human operator.
In the case of telegraphy, people were needed to sort, assemble, and ultimately deliver the telegrams to their proper destination. They also needed to figure out how to send more messages through the same set of transmission lines.
Back in the 1940s, you could have easily had a long career in either field. Today, while telephone is still going strong, telegraphy has been largely replaced by things like the Internet and SMS on mobile phones. You can still send telegrams, believe it or not, though the biggest name in telegraphy service, Western Union, stopped providing the service in January 2006.
